This week, Macrocosm’s April Zuo got the chance to interview one of our Discovery Lecture speakers, Prof. Alison Galloway, who gave us the inside scoop on her field of study.
Macrocosm: Can you introduce me to your field of work and your specific role in it?
Alison Galloway: I’m a forensic anthropologist and trained as a biological anthropologist. We look at the human form and function, but we also look at evolution. Many people look at primates and primate behavior.
My specialty is in osteology, which is the study of bones, and specifically human bones. Within that, I function as a forensic anthropologist, so I work in the medical legal context. I work with the medical team and coroners, and also the defense sometimes. Typically, I would look at skeletal trauma. I would look at the bodies that are skeletonized or decomposed and try to get the biology profile. We would look at things like the time at which they suffered the trauma, how long they’ve been dead, what happened to the body after death… Because we have a lot of scavengers, we want to make sure that what happened to the body is done by someone as opposed to an animal.
It’s a really cool field, and it’s a lot about being calm and being methodical.
M: Can you tell me about how you got into this field of work?
AG: I was interested in archeology in high school and through my undergrad, and I did a number of field seasons. Then, when I decided to go back to school, I was going to go back into archeology. But I had been working in an area where they were going to be putting a canal. They stuck me in the cemetery because no one else wanted to be there, and I was absolutely fascinated. So I decided that, when I go back, I was going to be an archeologist but look primarily at human material. I got into the lab with the bones, and the person that ran that lab was a forensic anthropologist and that was it. I never looked back.
M: Following up on that, what about forensic anthropology was appealing to you over archeology?
AG: I think for me, forensics is something that has an immediate application. You’re giving a chance for murder victims to “speak” about what happened to them. It’s a chance for families to find out what happened. So many people go to the grave with a child missing, and they never know what happened to that child, and that to me seems so terrible. Forensic anthropology can help that.
M: Do you ever take part in search and rescue as well? Or are you more often working in the lab?
AG: We do a bit of both. Typically bodies are found on the surface, but sometimes they’re buried and they want us to help them excavate. Also, with wildfires and house fires, they often don’t pick up everything, so I would go back to the scene and take another look. During the camp fire, we were out there for four days, and our team recovered around 14-15 bodies while I was there. In another instance, there was an incomplete recovery, so we went back to two different bodies and collected those.
M: Can you tell me about your first time doing search rescue and how it impacted you?
AG: Lord, I don’t even remember the first time I went to a scene. But the thing that first strikes you is how alone people were when they died. Because often they’re stuck in some forgotten spot, and that’s really hard when you know it’s been someone. In the Christina Williams case, she was only 14, and we see something about the circumstances in which victims died, and that can be a little hard to deal with sometimes. You can imagine how frightened they would have been in those situations. The fire is the same thing: we can see how people died.
M: Can you tell me about the strangest or most stand-out case you’ve seen?
AG: Sometimes cases are strange for different reasons. We had one case that hasn’t been solved yet. We found the body in 1996, or 1994, quite a long time ago. She was only 15, but she wasn’t reported missing until 2005. They weren’t able to make positive identification until 2012. I know that people don’t want to admit that somebody might be dead, but this was a case that bugged a lot of us, because she’d been killed, and we couldn’t even figure out who she was.
Other cases are weird in circumstance. There was a case in Marin County that was weird to begin with: the man had two girlfriends, and he decided to kill one of them. When he was arrested, he confessed, but then pleaded not guilty. But we could take his confession and match every single thing he said he’d done to injuries on the skeleton. It really helped at the trial, but it’s a case of very complex circumstances, and the matching felt weird.
M: During your discovery lecture, you talked about the emotional toll a job like this would bring. What are some ways that you deal with this burden?
AG: It’s not huge for me, but I do know that you begin to think very differently about death, because you see so many people who’ve fought for so long against death, they’ve suffered a lot in that fight, and they still died. We also see people who died very, very quickly because they probably did something stupid. Standing over the cliff is one of those things: you go over, the waves catch you and throw you against the rocks, and that’s it. It means you value life differently. It’s not like I’m haunted with ghosts, it’s just that you know how tenuous life can be.
M: Have you ever met any distressed victims who are uncooperative or even blame the team for not rescuing their family or friends? If so, how do you respond?
AG: No, typically when you go to the fire scene, most survivors are pets. I think in the immediate aftermath of the fire, people are so shocked that it hasn’t transitioned yet into anger. I think with the kinds of fires we’re seeing now, it’s not a question of “you could have saved me,” it’s a question of you get out, or you don’t get out. There’s no time for that, and once the flames get to the crown of the trees, you’re looking at flames 2-3 times the height of the trees, coming at you in a wall.
Sometimes, I drive around where I live and think “Yup, there are going to be casualties here.” Many of the places here have one entrance on the east side, which is where the wind is blowing. They would have to drive into the flames on long, winding, narrow, one-way, one-car-width roads to get in and out.
M: What prompted you to become a professor and teach students about your field of work?
AG: Well, there weren’t a lot of jobs for people who didn’t teach when I went out. There are some now, like larger jurisdictions where the medical examiner has a forensic anthropologist, but at the time I got out, there wasn’t much option than going into teaching. Then I found out I liked teaching. I like working with students.
It was fun especially when I got to Santa Cruz because instead of trying to teach in somebody else’s program that I didn’t necessarily agree with, I could design my own program. I also enjoyed CA having a much more diverse student body. I had taught in places before where they should have been attracting more diversity, but they weren’t, so I enjoyed that opportunity as well.
M: Finally, if you could go back in time to when you decided to start this work and tell yourself one thing, what would it be?
AG: I think it would be “be cautious with your conclusions.” Because there’s always a lot of pressure on us to support the conclusion that the prosecution or the defense wants to hear, and that’s not our job. We speak for the evidence and that’s it. It’s always a little challenging, especially when you’re new in the field, to have the confidence that you will say “This is what I’m saying, and I don’t care what you want because this is what the evidence tells me.” When you work defense cases, we’re always going to go up against friends because it’s a fairly small community. When I’m doing the defense, I know the person who wrote the original report, and sometimes it’s hard to think “Oh my god, what did they do?” because it’s a bad report and I can’t agree with it. And you gotta do that but also keep friendships, because otherwise you’d be alone. - April Zuo
Discovery Lecture: Search & Rescue After Wildfires
On our second day of COSMOS, Professor Alison Galloway gave her discovery lecture about search and rescue after fires and other aspects of forensic anthropology.
Prof. Galloway started with the nature of a fire: what makes it burn and which factors make it deadly, with most of the latter surprisingly not consisting of the fire itself. Instead, smoke density, toxic gases, and the inability to escape are, among others, the biggest killers.
From there, Prof. Galloway moved onto the impact of the fire on the human body. She talked about how the body’s position at the time of discovery is almost never the position upon death because the environment could have changed due to the fire—such as the floor burning and falling through—and the body would react accordingly. Additionally, the body typically assumes a pugilistic stance due to muscle contractions in response to the fire, where the victim’s limbs curl into the body and their legs splay out due to the weight of their thighs.
One more fascinating fact was that, in many cases, attempting to burn the body as a homicide coverup only results in superficial burning, since criminals often underestimate the amount of time the fire would need to burn before reaching the fat underneath the skin. This means that only the surface of the skin is burned, and the victim is still easily recognizable.
Prof. Galloway then moved on to the actual forensics of her work. She explained that, in order to determine the nature of the scene as accidental or homicidal, one of the strategies forensic anthropologists employ is searching for fracture lines on unburned bone, which may clue them towards a struggle that took place before the burning.
Then, Prof. Galloway explained the process of recovery and analysis in the case of an actual wildfire. During analyses, she and her colleagues try to determine how many victims there were and identify them, using telltale signs such as bone size and brittleness to deduce the victim’s age.
Lastly, she presented the major challenges in her work. Situations like incomplete or split recovery—not all bones of the victim are collected, resulting in one victim mistaken for two—interfere with the analysis process, and the recovery itself is often a dangerous task, especially in a dangerous post-fire environment with ash-induced darkness and sharp objects. Prof. Galloway also did not shy away from talking about the emotional toll that walking amongst the carnage can bring, and many participants expressed their admiration for the workers and volunteers, claiming that they would not be able to do the same. Prof. Galloway’s engaging lecture sparked curiosity and intrigue in many students. In the future, some, including myself, may find ourselves walking along this new road that she unveiled. - April Zuo
Our third COSMOS Discovery Lecture covered Global Mercury Pollution and Human Health Risks and was presented by Prof. Peter Weiss. He also treated us to a live performance of one of his hit songs, "Own Backyard," which you can watch here: